PingPong: MSX AUDIO and MSX MUSIC are part also from the MSX Standard. Although, yes, PSG is included in every MSX.

Yes, PSG is mandatory, and MSX AUDIO and MSX MUSIC are optional in the MSX standard. Although MSX MUSIC is not optional for the turboR.

/me raises an spear for SCC!

We shouldn't forget the great SCC. It's the first sound chip (after the PSG) that is most common to see on a MSX. Who doesn't have a Konami cartridge with SCC?

In case that you don't know Prodatron, the SCC is a 5-channel wavetable soundchip that was built-in in some Konami MSX cartridges. These cartridges were VERY EASILY modified to install a little switch that would allow to use the cartridge as sound card without loading the game at bootup. This chip works fine in the whole MSX standard (MSX1-MSXtR) and it sounds really well. It's not risky to say that almost every active MSX user have at least an SCC cartridge.

For more info: Konami's SCC tech specs

Ah, cool, so you can play something like Amiga MODs with this card? And the same is for the Moonsound? (to be honest, I didn't had a look at its specifications yet)
I like GUS-like cards a lot! Are there already MOD players available or is the ram of these cards not big enough?

Ops, 128bytes, so maybe some Amiga chip tunes may fit in its memory :/

Hehe, no with 32 bytes per wave the scc is not really the thing for modules. Moonsound can handle it just fine though. It has real 24 channel wavetable sound with up to 2MB of wave memory.

Great, I really need this Moonsound card! Hope they will produce some more soon. Do you have any Amiga MOD player for the MSX using the Moonsound?

AFAIK there is one MOD and one IT player made for Moonsound, correct me if I'm wrong. I remember even trying to use that MOD player, but I did not succeed.

There is also technically very impressive MOD player and even MOD editor for MSX tR (made by Xelasoft), that uses PCM output and if you want stereo you can also use Music-Module as second device.

Ah, and I should not forget, that I also made a MOD player for MSX1 & PSG

Look here:
http://www.msx.org/downcat75p1.html

About SCC... Yeah, it's indeed not very good for playing MOD files. If you trick a bit, you can change it to work as 4x 8bit DAC but you still need to process the wave data on CPU that is not very CPU friendly

SCC is more close to PSG. I actually even wrote PSG emulator for it, that goes into MSX tR BIOS and changes all the games, that use PSG trough BIOS to work on SCC. Maybe in future this kind of program could be plugin in SymAMP or a device driver
(www.msx.org/downcat64p2.html)

BTW sorry for repeating my self, but have you tried to run SymbOS in R800 CPU, how much it affects speed?
Another question: From what environment you start the SymbOS at the moment? DOS1 or DOS2? BASIC or DOS?

There are some mod players for the moonsound. Don't think anyone still uses them.. The mounsound can do so much more than what is done with mod files

I read the manual now, the Moonsound is even better than the Gravis Ultrasound with the exception of the number of channels.
@Nyyrikki: A mod player for the MSX1 is a great challenge! I will try it out soon. On the CPC I did Digitracker ( http://www.prodatron.net/details.htm?9 ), but it had only 3 channels, so you had to convert the MOD first. On the CPC it's very time-consuming to write to a PSG register.
Ok, we should better shift these sound discussions into another thread

prodateron, I don't quite remember how the gus performed with pitched-down samples, but the moonsound tends to sound metallic. Pity, no real way to create sublow rumbles with only 1kb worth o' samples orso, since you wouldn't need much above 40hz you coud really have all that by playing it back at a low pitch... but nope.. on moonsound you get loads o' metallic junk..

@Nyyrikki: Sorry, I couldn't test SymbOS with the TurboR yet, as I can't boot it in this configuration. I think it's because of its current quick and dirty basic loader. I still use this basic loader, I don't boot MSX-DOS before. I hope I can change this soon.
@Wolf: Well, I don't remember exactly. Of course you need to make additional samples, if you want pitch an instrument too much up or down.

Prodatron : you can't probably boot in the Turbo-R configutration, because this machine has the disk rom "embedded" in the MSX-DOS 2.3 rom, so I guess that you need first to support the Panasonic TC8566AF FDC before to be able to boot with SymbOS.

prodateron, that's not exactly what I mean.. I'm not talking about the instrument sounding unreal, which is what happens when you sample acoustic stuff and use it the whole range. I'm talking about sounds becoming metallic, due lack of filtering orso.

No, you really should not test that PSG MOD player. It sounds much better when told than when actually heard. It was a fun test, when I noticed, that frequency in MOD files are actually presented same way as PSG takes it in.

About the tR problem... I don't think the diskdrive interface is the problem as you don't even use it. I think it's more likely that there is still something wrong with the memory detection... I only wish I could have a peek *sigh*

Have you tried to run this on any other setup than BlueMSX MSX2 setup? BlueMSX default configurations are pretty "unreal" because they come with all the goods, you can get. I think, that you should test SymbOS in OpenMSX. Feature list is pretty much same but BlueMSX is more focused on user experience while OpenMSX is focused on accurate emulation of different models. Maybe you should try SymbOS in Phillips NMS-8250 with extra 512KB memory mapper & IDE or similar MSX2 configuration.

What is the Disk BASIC version you are loading the SymbOS? On DOS1 mode Disk BASIC version is 1.x and DOS2 mode it is 2.x